The Famished Road (28 page)

He stopped.

The rats continued chewing away at our lives.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, starting.

‘Rats.’

‘Oh, them,’ he said.

He was silent and I thought he had forgotten what he was saying. He blinked and rolled his eyes and groaned. A drop of blood that rolled down his forehead stopped on his cheek. I watched it as he resumed what he was saying.

‘I stayed with one or two relatives. I noticed that strange people started watching their houses. I heard about what happened in the street. I owed rent. I needed things for my camera. I thought enough time had passed. And then I found myself coming back home tonight. As I came I hid in dark places and tried to be careful but as I neared my compound two people jumped on me and hit my head with a cutlass and a stick and I fought them and ran into the forest. I stayed there. The mosquitoes bit me. The twolegged dog began to whine in the darkness. I couldn’t see it. I became hungry and I heard voices in the trees and then I decided it was time to come home and face the music.’

He paused again. The blood didn’t move on his cheek. Then he continued.

‘I took another route. This time I didn’t hide and I avoided dark places because I wanted our street people to recognise me. As I neared home two people, who had been hiding in the burnt van, jumped out and set on me. I shouted and they gave me as good a beating as they could before they ran. And then I came here, because I didn’t feel safe in my room or anywhere else.’

He was silent again. He listened to the rats and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

‘They must be big rats,’ he observed.

‘How do you know?’

‘You can tell by listening to them.’ I listened.

‘They have big teeth, sharp teeth,’ he said. ‘Did you know that in Egypt rats ate up a whole camel?’

‘What is a camel?’

‘The only animal that can survive in the desert.’ I marvelled at the idea of such an animal.

‘And rats ate it?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘With their teeth.’

I listened to the rats.

‘Will they eat us?’

‘They would have done so by now. But you can’t be sure.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of their hunger.’ I listened again.

‘But I know a good poison for killing them. The best. I will bring you some.’

The rats stopped eating.

‘They can understand us,’ I said.

‘Good.’

He stood up.

‘This head is hurting me. Lead me to the backyard. I want to wash away all this blood.’

I went out with him. The wind swept hard through the passage. At first it was very dark and I thought the clothes on lines were men in black glasses, but the wind made them flap, and I got used to the darkness. The photographer washed his wounds from a bucket near the well. He groaned in horrible agony. When we got back to the room Dad was awake.

‘Who is that?’ he asked as I came in.

I lit the candle. The photographer stood at the door with water and blood dripping down his neck. Dad looked at both of us without changing his expression. While the photographer dried his hair on his shirt I told Dad what had happened. I tried not to be loud, but soon Mum woke up. After Mum had learned what was going on she went and warmed some food for the photographer and pressed ointments on his wounds.

They all talked deep into the night. They discussed what they could do for him and insisted that he stay till the morning. They decided many other things as well but I don’t know what they were because I became drowsy and fell asleep.

When we woke up in the morning the photographer had gone. On the centre table there were the pictures of the celebration of my homecoming.

IN THE DIABOLICAL heat of that afternoon six illegitimate sons of minor warlords, whom I first thought were minotaurs, enacted a battle of ascendancies. They fought near the burnt van. No one came to separate them. They lashed at one another with long sticks, clubs, and whips. They all looked alike. They were the interchangeable faces of violence and politics. They were all muscular. They looked like failed boxers, like the thugs and the bullies and the carriers of loads that I had seen at the garage. They were hungry and wild. Their chests were bared. Their faces were awesome. And they fought for hours as if they were in a dark place, trapped in a nightmare.

Whips cracked. I saw the swift descent of a club; one of the men fell; three others surged over him. Two others grappled with the three and a man behind flogged their backs indiscriminately with a horsewhip. Soon they were all covered in foams of sweat and gore. Two of the men, fierce antagonists, their deep bronze skins glistening under the burning orb of sun, detached themselves from the chaos of bodies and concentrated on one another. The one whipped the other’s back, whipped the taut back till the skin broke into strips of whitish underflesh and soon turned red. The other bore it and after a while lifted his own whip and repeated the process on the other, lashing and flogging, with an absolute silence, utterly devoid of passion. They were disinterested enemies. They went on lashing and bearing the whips. Then one of them broke the spell, caught the other’s whip, and they both grappled, fell rolling on the ground, their backs covered with blood and sand.

One threw the other, kicked his head, and uttered a modest cry of exultation. The one on the floor picked up a stone. The other rushed at him. The one with the stone pressed it into the eye of the other, drawing a green sort of blood. The other didn’t cry out. They began punching each other, hitting one another in a dream-like sequence.

The bloodied eye grew greener and wider. The inhabitants of the street watched the fight, perplexed.

The other four men battled with one another senselessly. They fought on the bonnet of the burnt van. They fought all over the ground. They fought on the glass fragments from the photographer’s cabinet, bled, with bits of glass sticking from their backs, but went on fighting as though pain were alien to their flesh. At first it seemed we could make out a pairing; then their entangled combat baffled us, for they fought one another, every which way, without passion, without politics even, their eyes bulging.

It became impossible to tell what party they supported, what codes they were fighting for, or what was the purpose of their battle. They fought in the strangest ways, throwing sand into one another’s eyes, spitting, offering their faces up for punches, bearing the blows stoically, sometimes being knocked down by them and picking themselves up again and resuming the fray with absolute disinterested ferocity. One of them was kicked in the crotch and he jumped up and fell down, and rolled uncontrollably. When he got back up he kept stamping the ground. And while he tried to sort out his agony another man, who I thought was on his side, came and smashed his head with a brick and he fell down and stretched out like a dead animal.

‘They are the madmen of our history,’ one of the inhabitants on the street said.

‘They are just waiting for a crazy war to come along.’

And then quite suddenly the man who had stretched out like a dead animal began to twitch on the earth. He twitched and kicked and made guttural noises. Then, like a figure in a nightmare, he rose from his death, his upper part stiff, his eyes dull and passionless. When he stood up he released a deep-throated sound of laughter. He brought out something from his back pocket, waved it in the air seven times, pressed it between his hands till he crushed out a flow of red juices, and then hit the chest of an advancing antagonist with his open palm.

The man who had been hit screamed as if he had been branded, and then he fell heavily on the ground and thrashed about in mortal agony. The man with the peculiar weapon repeated his feat with another antagonist, slapping him on the face so hard it sounded like a minor thunderclap. We saw the man’s face turn red and the redness began to drip as if it were melting wax. The man turned round and round, shouting and stamping, and fell on his knees, holding his face. And when he stood up again, swaying, we saw his raw underflesh in the shape of a man’s palmprint. The skin had dissolved. He wailed like a madman who was being tortured.

The three men now gathered and thoroughly beat up the only man left standing on the other side. They threw him to the ground five times in succession. They jumped on his chest and kicked his head and lifted him up and knocked him around till he collapsed altogether. Then the alliances clarified themselves. The three men picked up their large shirts, waving them like monstrous flags, and went up the street, arms held high, chanting the songs of their ascendancy, the songs of the Party of the Poor, or was it of the Rich. No one could be certain. Then I recognised the new incarnation of their recurrent clashes, the recurrence of ancient antagonisms, secret histories, festering dreams. The three men went their way, dancing up the street, and no one cheered them, no one acknowledged their victory, and no one thought of them as heroes.

The three thugs of the Rich Party—or was it the Poor Party—lay writhing on the ground. The one who had been hit on the chest got up, groaning. The sign of a palm was imprinted on his massive chest as on burnished brass. He went and helped the other two. Like a sad bunch of thieves, like crooks who had been set upon, like a defeated army of rogues, they leaned on one another, wailing, each twisted in the direction of their injury’s gravity. They staggered down the street, hobbling away from their vanquishers.

WHEN THE FIGHTERS left, the air of the street was charged with fear. It was late evening. The sound of a plate breaking, of two people quarrelling, made us suspicious. The heat and the glare restrained the movement of things arid I did not wander far from home that day because I feared that all over the world thugs with fire in their brains were pounding one another in a weird delirium of history.

Staying in that day taught me how long a hot afternoon could be, how the heat could slow time down. I sat on the cement platform arid listened to the flies. Flying ants were all over the place. Lizards ran up and down walls, sunning themselves, nodding. I went to buy some beans from an itinerant trader of cooked food. She had a constant companionship of flies. And she had the most amazing signs tattooed to the sides of her mouth. When she smiled the signs looked odd, but when she was serious they made her look beautiful. She sold me a few pennies’ worth of beans and offered to sell me Kokoro at a discount.

‘What is Kokoro?’ I asked.

‘They are the ants that feed off the beans.’

‘Ants?’

‘Yes. They are good for you. They make you brilliant and help you grow up fast.’

I bought some fried ants as well and went and sat in the shade. I ate the beans and the ants and drank some water. Then I got drowsy and slept outside our door. The sun burned on me and when Mum got back and woke me up I couldn’t see anything for almost a minute. I was quite blind and everything was composed of blue and red and yellow whorls. Mum led me into the room and made me lie down. When I woke it was evening. The blindness had given way to the world’s variety of colours. Mum had gone out.

Mum’s absence got me worried. I locked the door, hid the key under the threadbare doormat, and went looking for her. I went down the street and encountered our landlord. With a cold gaze and a contemptuous voice he asked if my parents were in.

‘No,’ I said.

‘When will they be back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tell them I am coming to see them tonight about my rent and another matter, you understand?’

I nodded. He hurried towards our compound. I went on. My stomach started to ache and I felt sure the fried ants were crawling around inside. Suddenly a powerful stench invaded the air. Everywhere I turned the stench was there, unbearable, unavoidable.

And then I saw the nightsoil man coming towards me. I didn’t want to offend him so I didn’t move or run. But I held my breath. He staggered and wobbled under the heavy weight. Hooded and masked in a filthy blue cloth, I saw his bulging eyes, and his fierce glare. He grunted, buckling, as he passed me. Feeling the full pressure of airlessness, I ran; and when I breathed I felt very ill. So did everyone else. Before I knew it I was near the bar. And outside, in front of the bar, talking in between covering their noses, were Madame Koto and Mum. I went back home. The smell stayed in the air and even when I shut the door it was still there.

After a while Mum came in. She looked very tired. She said Madame Koto had been asking after me. I told her the landlord’s message; she got very agitated.

‘The rent?We don’t have enough money. When did he say he was coming?’

‘Tonight.’

She sat still for a while. Then she went over to her basin of provisions, took out a tin box, and started counting her money. She counted it for a long time, with sweat breaking out on her forehead. When she finished she sat still again for a while. Then she unloosened one end of her wrapper and counted the money she had there. It got quite late. I lit another candle. Mum was quite oblivious of everything. She was still counting her money, calculating how much she needed for a fresh stock of provisions, how much profit she had made, when imperious knocks sounded on our door. Mum jumped up, spilling most of her money on the floor. She picked it up in a hurry and put it away before she said, with sweat on her eyelashes:

‘Azaro, see who is knocking.’

I went to the door and opened it and the landlord came in, pushingme into the room, opening the door wide, as if he wanted the whole world to hear what he had to say. He had three other men with him. They were strangers. They were very big, with welldeveloped muscles, and the mad eyes of political thugs. They wore matching uniforms and they came into the room and stood, side by side, with legs planted wide, their backs against the wall. They folded their arms and looked at us with the sort of contempt reserved for insects.